Category: Knights Templar

Janet Wolter and Alan Butler Make False Claims about Templars, Pyramids, Gothic Architecture, and More in Podcast Interview

5/29/2020

Not long ago, The Freemasons podcast interviewed former America Unearthed host Scott Wolter at length and ended with a promise to give his wife a platform to expand on her goddess-tinged vision of ancient America. So now we have a 90-minute podcast featuring Janet Wolter and her writing partner Alan Butler—the guy who once wrote that moon had been built by time-travelers from the future—in which the pair expound on their book America: Nation of the Goddess, with very little that isn’t already in the book. You can read my review here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3. I feel like I should say something about the podcast, but it’s hard to find much new to say about the dull repetition of years-old, debunked claims. Therefore, I’ll focus on the material that isn’t quite so familiar.

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Scott Wolter: Ancient Freemasons from Göbekli Tepe May Have Built U.S. Mounds

5/15/2020

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As is his wont, former America Unearthed host Scott Wolter made another of his regular and baffling podcast appearances, this time on the Masonic Unknown Philosophers online broadcast, which apparently took the form of a Zoom call last Friday before being posted online this week. The production values were poor, the background music distracting, and the hosts somewhere between amateurish and incompetent. It was, in other words, a perfect platform for Wolter to spout a new torrent of bizarre claims about the so-called Cremona Documents, a set of almost certainly fake medieval texts from Italy that Wolter firmly believes relate the secret history of Western civilization from the dawn of time down to the Knights Templar. Even Wolter himself recognizes that these texts are “almost too good to be true,” but he has convinced himself that the doubts about their authenticity are nothing compared to the truest he places in the personal relationships he has with the dubious figures who promote this nonsense.

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Scott Wolter Appears on Freemason Podcast, Talks Goddess-Worship and "Bling"

4/28/2020

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This past week, former America Unearthed host Scott Wolter appeared on a Freemason podcast to discuss his usual round of nonsense, devoting most of the time to reminiscing about his favorite America Unearthed episodes from the previous decade and his beloved Kensington Rune Stone claims from the decade before that. However, there were a few interesting highlights, mostly surrounding his enhanced view of goddess worship and his growing acceptance of outdated early twentieth century views of Christianity as an astrological myth.

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Rory Duff Claims Knights Templar Sought Sonic Vortex Holy Grail in Spain

4/8/2020

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I feel like I should analyze in some depth the newest guest article published on Graham Hancock’s website. In it, Rory Duff claims to have discovered the real Holy Grail and that it is a vortex created by a network of sound waves that envelops the Earth. These sonic ley lines are somehow both broad enough to form pathways and nodes hundreds of miles across on one of his maps but area also narrow enough that single church can be positioned exactly on the line and not a meter left or right of it in other parts of his work. According to Duff, the Knights Templar learned of these lines beneath the Temple Mount in Jerusalem and spent centuries hunting for the most important vortex that would serve as the true Grail, located somewhere in Spain.

But I just can’t do it.

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Scott Wolter Gives New Interview, Suggests Second Kensington Runestone Exists

3/25/2020

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Scott Wolter did another interview, this time with biophysicist and pyramid conspiracy theorist John DeSalvo on the Science and Paranormal Hour radio show. DeSalvo appeared on an episode of America Unearthed and claims to have lost half his listeners as a result. That’s neither here nor there, nor is the fact that I can’t stand his voice. He sounds like a midcentury children’s show clown, and for me it was like listening to fingernails on chalkboard. His habit of shouting all of his questions made it still worse, his effusive praise of Wolter notwithstanding. (Even Wolter noted that DeSalvo was blowing smoke up his ass.)

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Review of Rob Riggle: Global Investigator S01E02: "The Holiest of Grails"

3/16/2020

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The Holy Grail is a medieval myth whose very form changes in protean fashion as the story passed from one medieval bard to the next. The Grail doesn’t have any role in myth and legend before 1190 CE, and it had only a tenuous connection to the Knights Templar until Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall developed a conspiracy theory in 1818. (Previously, the Grail guardians in medieval poems had been modeled on the Templars, but were not explicitly the knights.) Typically, I’d give a detailed background on the history of the Holy Grail, but there is really no point here, since Rob Riggle: Global Investigator doesn’t have any interest in proving its conspiracy theories. Instead, it simply begins with the premise that fringe history conspiracy theories about the Grail are legitimate history, and it proceeds from there, with no attempt to explain or justify its reasons for adopting these bad ideas.

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Scott Wolter Embraces Atlantis, Claims Newly Translated Papers Document "Templar" Construction of the Newport Tower

1/22/2020

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Last week, former America Unearthed host Scott F. Wolter appeared on Jimmy Church’s Fade to Black radio show. The first half of the discussion was mainly recaps of Wolter’s usual spiel about the Kensington Rune Stone and Templars, but I was particularly taken by Wolter’s new line that he is moving away from hard science after claiming to discover that there is an “intuitive spiritual aspect” to ancient history that that defies the laws of science. Wolter said that he was not comfortable with this discovery at first but has come to accept and embrace a supernatural aspect to history. Things got weirder and worse from there.

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Thursday Roundup: Wolter's Hooked X Souvenirs and "Ancient Origins" in Ecuador

1/9/2020

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I spent part of yesterday meeting with my lawyer again after I received a multi-page letter from the attorney representing the same occasional cable TV figure who has made legal demands against me for the past four years. This time, he is claiming that I am involved in a “civil conspiracy” to defame him. Anyway, it’s a long, involved thing, and that has sadly limited my time for writing today. Therefore, I will share two brief stories that are interesting, but about which there isn’t a lot to say.

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Scott Wolter: Travel Channel Cancels "America Unearthed"

1/2/2020

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Happy New Year! As we start the new year, it’s time to take stock of a few odds and ends left over from the month that just passed by. First, I will share my unalloyed joy that the offensively incompetent Unexplained + Unexplored on the Science Channel hit a series low of just 299,000 viewers on Sunday for its painfully awful effort to find the Fountain of Youth. The show has steadily lost viewers for the majority of its eight weeks, according to the Nielsen ratings, which is typically the kiss of death for a cable show. It lost 10% from its lead-in and barely squeaked by the ratings for mid-afternoon reruns of Dr. Pohl on NatGeo and the middle of the night reruns of Married to Medicine on Bravo. Of course, it’s also a show about history conspiracy theories, and cable networks love to renew those because they are considered “evergreens” that can be rerun, repackaged, and resold around the world for years to come. And it did manage to outdraw original shows on other cable channels in its 10 PM timeslot, including Oxygen’s lineup.

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The Year in Review: 2019 in Pseudohistory, Space Aliens, and Conspiracy Theories

12/28/2019

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Perhaps more than any year in recent memory, 2019 was the year in which fringe history stopped being fringe and went completely mainstream. This year, we saw pseudohistory and conspiracy theories top the literary bestseller lists, multiply across cable channels like mushrooms on a rotten log, and attract record crowds to traveling carnivals masquerading as pseudohistory “fan” conventions. It perfectly captures the tenor of the times for the post-truth era that the very notions of fact and fiction ceased to have meaning. This was a long, hard year, both for the world and also for me personally. After dealing with family health problems, buying and selling a house (and still not being able to close on selling the old one until early 2020, nearly half a year after the sale), writing two books, and a knot of lawyers for many different developments, I am ready for this unpleasant year to end. Let’s look back in anger:

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